The Love of the Dead Read online

  November, now, and winter was coming on. It wasn’t quite here, but soon. Another couple of weeks, maybe even before the start of December, she’d be freezing. She didn’t have central heating, just a wood stove and her oven. She didn’t have gas, but she did have an electric heater stored in the shed for the coldest months.

  When she finished her shower, Beth headed into the kitchen and took out a pint of milk. She sniffed it, figured it was a little past the sell-by date, but it didn’t reek or anything. She filled a mug and put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes.

  When it was done, she spooned in hot chocolate and instant coffee and three sugars. She checked the clock. Waited for a minute, the drink cooling. The minute hand hit twelve and that was it. The day was done. Now it was just a long slow slide until bedtime.

  She poured in the whiskey and sat at the table with the mug in both her hands, trying to warm herself through. She was colder than she had any right to be. Some part of her reasoned that it was just shock, but it didn’t feel like shock. It felt like a death, a small death, maybe, but something quite definitely final.

  She tried to figure it out while she had her dinner and her medicine all rolled into one.

  She’d experienced death today.

  That had to change you. Knowing what it felt like to be decapitated. She didn’t remember how it felt, physically, but emotionally, she felt it right down into her soul. The shock, the jarring impact sensed as her head hit the floor. Warm blood, but no pain. Sadness. The blade had been so sharp there hadn’t been any accompanying sensation. Just a kind of confusion, looking up at her headless body from the floor. The sense of her body slumping, the life leaving it, while her vision clouded, then ended as the blood washed over her unblinking eyes.

  A head in a box seemed almost inconsequential after that.

  No. That wasn’t right. It had been shocking and terrifying. But it wasn’t the head, or seeing death through Mary Westmoor’s eyes.

  It was Mary, alone.

  No. That wasn’t quite right, either.

  She took a gulp of her drink, not really tasting it. Thinking hard while she cradled the cup in her shaking hands.

  What was it? There had been something there. Something she’d noticed at the time, but that hadn’t quite registered.

  Mary. Alone. Waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  For her, of course.

  “Oh.” She sat back, leaning against the back of the chair. Realized what it meant.

  Mary had known she would come. Spirits had known she would go looking.

  Spirits knew things that the living could never know. Spirits, even those that didn’t move over to the other side, those that waited, angry or sad or just plain lonely, those spirits still touched the other side. There was knowledge there. Secrets.

  That was what she’d been told, but that was a matter of faith.

  She’d lost her faith a long time ago. Maybe it was on the day her son died. Maybe it was when she started drinking. Not the tipple at Christmas, and the one over the eight at a friend’s wedding. The real business of drinking, which when you got right down to it wasn’t about being drunk but working toward something bigger. Working toward solace, peace, or whatever came at the end of it.

  Death?

  She shrugged with no one to see her.

  Is that what she wanted?

  She’d tried it out tonight. She didn’t want that. She wasn’t a coward, but this was bigger than her. Spirits were involved somehow. Not the personal spirits she saw on a daily basis. The big one. The one she didn’t believe in anymore.

  But maybe the big one believed in her.

  Was there reason to hope?

  Someone at some seminar once had told her that time was different for spirits. Was it in Thetford? With Mary and Stan? Might have been. It didn’t matter.

  What was spirit? A form of consciousness that lived in the past, present, and future, all at the same time? What a body left behind when it died? Memory, thought, personality, love...did all these remain?

  Sure they did, she thought. She’d seen enough to believe that. It wasn’t a matter of faith. She’d observed it. Maybe not good enough for a scientist. Maybe not good enough for a Christian, but good enough for her.

  But could the dead see the shape of things to come? If they did, she’d never known them to intervene. They gave comfort where they could. They confirmed things, sometimes, but life was about learning. They didn’t teach. That wasn’t their job.

  But Mary had waited for her. She took an active hand in showing Beth the way. She pushed, damn it.

  What did that even mean? Had the dead stepped down, stepped in? Was this killer so unnatural that the spirit world felt it had to take a hand?

  She’d never known spirits to be so active outside of stories she’d read before her life became a kind of story.

  She finished her drink, stood, then sat down again with a thump. She remembered Miles taking her hand when she found the head.

  He’d put her hand on the head. He’d led her where she didn’t want to go.

  “Fuck,” she said, more afraid than ever, because the things she thought she understood didn’t make sense any more.

  She wasn’t just stuck in the middle of a nightmare. She was being led through it by the dead.

  A tap came from the window and she jumped. It was full dark, so she couldn’t see what it was for a second. Then she picked out the shape from the darkness.

  A raven, beak tapping on the glass, hard and insistent then harder and so loud she put her hands over her ears and shouted for it to go away.

  But it didn’t. The glass cracked. It shattered across the floor, flashing like diamonds in the light. The raven cawed, an awful sound, and flew into her kitchen.

  It was his, she knew, and it had come for her.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The raven flew through the window while the glass was still falling, wings batting aside glittering fragments as it dove for her head. Beth threw her arms up, and the raven sank its beak into the fleshy underside of her forearm, then pulled back and tore a chunk loose. It flicked it into the air and flapped its wings, holding itself beneath the falling morsel. Beth screamed with fury and terror and smashed the bird as hard as she could with her arm. She didn’t catch it with much force, but it was enough to stop it from eating her.

  She didn’t get a chance to take a good swing at it again. It clawed at her face and got its foot tangled in her hair. She flailed at it, crying out all the time. She couldn’t shift it. She could feel blood running down her face, now, running down her neck. Hands clutching at the bird, her head hanging down, she saw her blood dripping onto her table.

  She stood and even tried to head-butt the table, anything, just to get it out of her hair. It wouldn’t budge, but it shifted its weight ’round—God, it was heavy. It took a stab with its beak at her eye. It even managed to grasp her eyelid, pulling it back. She wrenched her head back, her neck cracking, desperate to get it off, kill it, to save her eye.

  She heard a bird cry and thought maybe she’d hurt it. It let go of her eyelid and blood poured across her vision, so for a second she didn’t see where it went. There were wild cries filling the room. She panicked, blind now in both eyes, blood pouring. There were more of them. The room was full of birds. She felt them flapping around her head, their wings batting her, the wind buffeting her. The screams of the birds were terrible, and somewhere in all that noise she was crying out herself.

  She threw herself on the floor and tried to get under the table. She wiped the blood from her eyes. They stayed clear just long enough for her to see something she couldn’t understand at first. The kitchen was filled with seagulls. Maybe twenty or thirty, flapping, squawking, and fighting. She saw a seagull by her side, dead, one flat eye staring up at her. The raven was in among them, lost somewhere in their number. They were attacking it, but it was fighting back, fighting back hard. Another seagull dropped with a heavy bang onto her kitchen t
able. Then the raven dropped, too, wings broken and covered with blood.

  A leg twitched weakly and shit ran out of it.

  The seagulls fell on it and tore it to pieces. She could hear bones shattering under their rage.

  Finally they finished, and only bloody feathers and fragile, hollow bones remained.

  The last of the seagulls flapped its wings and flew out of her shattered window. Beth pulled herself from under the table. Blind in one eye, in agony from a hundred small cuts in her scalp and pouring blood from the big wound in her arm, she stumbled across the shit and blood on the tiles, trying to take it in. Trying to understand. Crying.

  She slipped down in the muck and sprained her ankle. She didn’t even notice it, just righted herself and turned around, eyes wide, blinking through dripping blood.

  Her kitchen was ruined. Everything was covered with feathers and blood. Four seagulls were dead, one still fluttering its wings weakly. There was hardly anything left of the raven.

  She took the seagull up in her arms. She stroked it softly and, holding it, slid back to the floor among the mess.

  When the policemen finally broke in her door and found her, she was still sitting there, holding a dead bird, stroking it, thanking it over and over again.

  “Thank you,” she sobbed. And again, stroking, holding, looking down into its flat, blank eye. Wishing it back to life. But it was dead and there wasn’t any coming back, not for saints, not for sinners, not for brave seagulls or bitter lonely women.

  She could feel it on the freezing air, feel it in her blood. Feel his hand in this, feel it cold on her skin, too, but it was a comfort, somehow, because she couldn’t take anymore.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Ma’am? Mrs. Willis?”

  A different policeman. The nightshift, maybe. He spoke softly to her while his colleague spoke into the radio clipped just below his shoulder.

  “Ma’am? Can I have the bird?”

  She looked up from the bird and into his face. He was sincere. Concerned. But she laughed, just the same.

  Something in her face made him recoil.

  “I need to get you to a hospital,” he said, watching her carefully, like she might try to ram the bird up his ass. She thought about it. “Can you walk?”

  “Of course I can fucking walk,” she snapped. “But I’m not going to the hospital.”

  He pointed at her arm, pouring blood down her skirt.

  “You need stitches. There’s a chunk missing from your arm.”

  She shook her head, turned her attention back to the bird. She could hear the other policeman on his radio. Telling them she was attacked by a flock of birds. She thought about telling him he was wrong, but one bird, a flock of birds, what did it matter? It was all so ridiculous. Totally. It wouldn’t make sense to them, to their dispatcher. It didn’t make sense to her.

  The raven had tried to kill her. Tried to eat her, for God’s sake.

  The seagulls had killed it.

  A fairly simple set of events, but so beyond the pale it could only be make-believe.

  But then she imagined what Peter would have said. Clear as anything, she could hear his voice, his certainty. Rock solid, unwavering.

  “It happened, honey. It’s true. Just got to believe.”

  She did believe, because the evidence was strewn all around her kitchen.

  “I really need to get you to a hospital.”

  “No.” She stared at him flatly. No arguments, her stare said. He backed off, maybe a little frightened of this petite woman staring him down through matted, blood-soaked hair that used to be blonde.

  “No,” she said again through gritted teeth, with blood pouring down her face, stroking a dead bird.

  “I’ve got a first-aid kit in the car,” he said, instead of fighting a losing battle.

  “Well, then, officer. Make yourself useful, and go and get it. As far as I can see there’s not been a crime, has there?”

  “I...I don’t know.”

  “Get me someone who does. Get me Coleridge. I want to see him. Right now.”

  “I can’t...”

  “Don’t bullshit me. Call him. He’ll come. I’ll talk to him.”

  He shook his head, then pushed himself to his feet and headed out of the door.

  She needed to clean up this mess, but first off, she really needed to clean her cuts. She could feel the poison seeping into her blood. The filth of the raven. The filth of him.

  She had no doubt. The raven wasn’t him, but it carried his disease. His taint.

  Laying the seagull aside, she pushed herself to her feet and walked through the carnage in her kitchen and into the bathroom.

  The policemen couldn’t protect her from him, but they could clean up. After all, that was the policemen’s job, wasn’t it? It wasn’t about protection. It was about picking up the pieces, and when he came for her they wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it. They’d just make their little drawings, take their little pictures, and fuss over her corpse.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Blood ran along the bottom of the bath in a meandering river. Streams of blood broke and merged and swirled. The scalding water made Beth’s scalp tingle until it was nearly painful, but she didn’t turn the heat down. Standing under the steaming water, watching her blood wash away, she wondered if that was his plan. For her to sicken and die.

  But she didn’t feel sick. She felt afraid. Terrified. She shook so hard she couldn’t hold onto the soap, and her legs were barely able to hold her upright. Sure, she was frightened.

  She turned off the water while the blood was still running free. She pulled on her robe and walked to her bedroom. There was a mirror there, and she spent some time checking over her face. There was a long scratch down one cheek, a hole in her neck where one of the bird’s talons must have dug in. Her blonde hair was red at the roots, her scalp torn in so many places she couldn’t even begin to count.

  Her eye was a mess. There was a tear in her eyelid, but that had stopped bleeding. The raven must have caught her eye, because she still couldn’t see properly. Her other eye was fine, though, and that would have to do for now.

  She could feel the blood running down her arm from the gash the bird’s beak had made. She almost definitely needed stitches, but she wasn’t about to leave her house and Miles and all she owned. Not when he was out there.

  Something protected her here. She might not be safe, but she was a damn sight safer on home ground than out in the night somewhere strange.

  Miles. Where the hell was Miles?

  He’d been around for so long he was almost background noise. Her very own haunting. But he hadn’t been there while she was being attacked.

  Maybe he was afraid, too. The killer had cut his throat after all, and even though he was dead, that couldn’t have been much fun.

  There was no point in hunting for him or calling for him. He’d come back or he wouldn’t, and if he did, it wasn’t like she could ask him where he’d been. He couldn’t talk. He wouldn’t, anyway. He was still angry with her. She couldn’t say she blamed him.

  “Beth? Mrs. Willis?”

  Coleridge.

  She was surprised at the relief she felt.

  “In here,” she called.

  He loomed in the doorway. He filled it, a solid, reassuring presence.

  “You okay?”

  She shook her head. He nodded, like, stupid question, fair enough. But then she was crying and she couldn’t stop. Her shoulders began to shake, then her legs. She shook so hard she had to go and sit on the bed to stop from falling down.

  He came over to the bed and sat beside her. She rose about half a foot as his weight settled and the bed groaned.

  One of the other policemen poked his head around the door.

  “Fuck off for now, eh?” said Coleridge. The head retreated.

  Beth sobbed, and he put a hand on her shoulder. It felt good to have some human contact. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since
anyone with a pulse touched her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

  “I’d be worried if you didn’t.”

  “It’s just...I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m a medium. You understand?”

  “You see dead people? All that kind of stuff?”

  “Sure I do. I see dead people, right? I must be a little off my rocker. People talk about me in town. Most of the time I don’t give a shit. But I wonder sometimes. I wonder if I’m really some kind of fucking lunatic, making it all up, just seeing things. Like I should be on psych meds or in a padded cell. Maybe this whole life of mine is just a really long breakdown. You know?”

  She could see that he didn’t. Not really. And that was OK, because who would? He didn’t even pretend like he understood.

  “I saw my first dead person when I was a teenager. Real as you. Solid. Most can’t speak, you know. The dead.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “They’re just kind of...there. They can speak through someone living. Like a vessel. Sometimes they use someone living to communicate. They can write, for some reason. People do that. Automatic writing. Channel a spirit’s voice onto paper, their thoughts, their ideas.”

  “I didn’t know that, either.”

  “You think this is all bullshit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know much.”

  “I got a name.”

  “What?”

  “A name. Might be nothing. Might be him.”

  She shook her head. “It can’t be, because you don’t know the whole of it. You don’t know what I know. It can’t be him, because the killer’s dead.”

  Coleridge nodded. Didn’t look at her.

  “You think I’m nuts?”